For Intel’s upcoming Core Ultra 200 desktop processors, perhaps more familiar by their code-name “Arrow Lake”, Intel has removed Hyper-Threading from the P-cores. That makes those CPUs narrower, so they might not need as much memory bandwidth, right? Well, the Skymont E-cores are nearly three times as wide as the previous-gen’s Crestmont cores, and on top of that, they also clock considerably higher. In other words, you’re going to need lots of memory bandwidth if you want to make use of the 24 CPU cores on a Core Ultra 9 285K.
The product page isn’t up—otherwise we’d go get our own screenshot—but in the image from 188号, we can clearly see that the motherboard supports transfer rates at least as high as 9200 MT/s, and maybe even higher. That’ll be overclocking of course; it looks like the base memory speed for Arrow Lake will likely be 5600 MT/s, same as extant DDR5 platforms. However, arguably even more exciting is the idea that we’ll be able to use RAM as fast as 6800 MT/s in 4-DIMM configurations.
Why bother with such fast RAM? It’s really not a complicated problem to understand: CPU cores process data, and faster CPUs need more data to process. As CPUs get wider and wider, both in terms of the core technologies as well as the number of cores, the demands on memory bandwidth continue to increase. You won’t see the effects of faster RAM as much in lightly-threaded tasks like gaming; that’s more about memory latency. In productivity workloads, though, it can make a huge difference.
Intel’s Core Ultra Series 2 processors and the new LGA1851 motherboards expected to launch alongside them are thought to be coming along in late October of this year. We’re quite eager to see how Intel’s efforts updating its architecures have paid off. Arrow Lake brings along new core architectures for every part of the chip, so it might just be a major step forward for the blue team—and Intel could use a spot of good news.